News
Local

Three words under-achievers dread to hear most neatly summarizes the progress — or lack thereof — measured in 28.4% of student test scores administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) for 2012.

They are included in the Fraser Institute Elementary School Report Card 2013.

Despite all the earnest talk of Dalton McGuinty about being the ‘education premier’, there is plenty of contrary evidence to challenge that claim in this annual survey of Ontario’s elementary schools.

Of course, there are some standout results amongst the 2,714 schools covered.

Over the past five years, Grade 3 reading and writing has shown steady statistical improvement. So has Grade 6 in the same areas.

Still, it is that stubborn 28.4% of test scores coming in below provincial standards that should be the focus of attention, according to Peter Cowley.

He’s the co-author of this report and is cautious to add that those students in the subset are not defined as failures.

Rather, they are falling below the standard set by the EQAO itself.

“If you took all the tests written in all the schools in the report card and all marked with EQAO levels and sorted them, you’d see that 28.4% did not reach the provincial standard.

“The figure shows lower performance rates are lessening but there are schools and students who could still could do better,” Cowley said.

“To have student tests revealing flat line performance in some disciplines will be a concern,” Cowley said. “We accept these are relative ratings and that not all schools can be No. 1, but at the same time we have to ask why some do better than others by such a wide margin.

“The challenge for the province is to deliver a plan that addresses what to do about it.”

It’s not as if schools can plead lack of funding.

School Board funding projections (excluding capital programs) estimates more than $21 billion will be put toward the province’s 73 school board districts in the current 2012-13 school year.

This, in a province with a projected deficit of close to $11.9 billion under the Liberals, is a fair slice of the funding pie.

Doretta Wilson, of the Society for Quality Education, said harder questions have to be asked of the teachers themselves for poor performance in some school board areas.

“Who is teaching the teachers and how are they doing it,” Wilson said. “I sometimes get the feeling new teachers are being taught how to be good unionists and be aware of all their rights and remedies under the Act, but clearly they seem to be less than able to get more from their students.

“Elementary school sets up a child for their entire educational experience. They deserve the best and at the moment in Ontario successive education ministers have thrown money at the problems of education in the hope that things will somehow magically improve.

Last year’s Drummond Report into deficit reduction strategies for Ontario recommended cutting non-teaching staff by 12% or about 10,000 positions. This includes social workers, speech language pathologists, psychologists and educational assistants working with special needs students.

Drummond revealed non-teaching ranks have shot up by an extra 14,000 in the last decade.

Premier Kathleen Wynne must decide if she will address those recommendations and at the same time end such big-ticket Liberal education policies as full-day kindergarten and class size caps to meet the Drummond-recommended 1% cap on spending growth for education. When and if those recommendations are implemented across the province there will be even more pressure on teachers to deliver results without the perceived help they have been used to.